For an hour or two today, Gmail was down. The entire world basically screeched to a halt. The economy crashed. A monkey in a coat wandered around an Ikea, in Toronto. And in offices everywhere, people were forced to talk to each other. Why did we ever think it was a good idea to trust our entire life to an Internet text-ad company that thought "Google+" was a good idea?

Any good Gmail-is-down story has four major elements: 1) Notice that the service was unavailable; 2) Vague references to people complaining on Twitter; 3) News that Google’s Apps Status Dashboard had no updates; 4) A promise of updates.

The month of excruciatingly slow news and gift guides is here, but, thankfully, not all journalists have decided to mindlessly regurgitate pointless news.